Reviews

Kengo: Legend of the 9

Ideally, there would have been a tutorial mode to go over some of the finer points and nuances of the fighting. To learn how to better use -- or at least understand -- things like the kumitachi moves would have been a plus.

You don't need a tutorial, though, to figure out where to move in the game. This is an invisible-wall-a-thon. My guess is that if I'm alone against a few dozen dudes with swords, I'm going to try to make the most out of my environment. Sadly, you can't. You can't jump onto anything. And -- ridiculously -- sometimes, you can't even jump off of something as low to the ground as a deck. You have to backtrack to the three steps that you climbed to get onto the deck to get off of it. Indoor battles are just as goofy. Enemies would come flying through a door to attack you, but if you tried to go through that same door, it was as if you were trying to walk through stone.

In addition to the main game, Legend of the 9 offers some other quasi-online ways to wield your weapon. In the Mission Mode, you can run through ten different time-based missions. You can then upload your best times and see how you did against other would-be samurai. Even less satisfying is the Xbox Live Nationwide Contest. After completing the main mode of the game, you can then upload one of your samurai's stats. Disappointingly, you don't get the very cool chance to then go head-to-head against live competition. What happens is that you get to watch a simulated battle between your character and that of another gamer. As far as I'm concerned, on a disc full of letdowns, that's the biggest one.

In case you haven't been paying attention for the past 1,000 or so words, you have to really like samurai to want to play this. And I mean really, really like samurai. You need to have named your dog "Samurai." No, you need to have two dogs and have named them both "Samurai." That's the type of love you have to have for samurai to be able to play through this one. Everyone else should just pick up the Criterion Collection edition of Kurosawa's epic film, "Ran."